Barbara Blomberg — Complete eBook

The Emperor Charles had again gone to foreign countries,
and therefore festivals and shows no longer attracted
her. She rarely allowed herself a visit to Frau
Dubois, but, above all, she talked with her boys and
about them like every other mother. It even seemed
to Pyramus as though her old affection for the Emperor
Charles was wholly dead; for when, in November of
the following year, agitated to the very depths of
his being, he brought her the tidings that the Emperor
had been surprised and almost captured at Innsbruck
by Duke Maurice of Saxony, who owed him the Elector’s
hat, and had only escaped the misfortune by a hurried
flight to Carinthia, he merely saw a smile, which
he did not know how to interpret, on her lips.
But little as Barbara said about this event, her mind
was often occupied with it.

In the first place, it recalled to her memory the
dance under the lindens at Prebrunn.

Did it not seem as if her ardent royal partner of
those days had become her avenger?

Yet it grieved her that the man whose greatness and
power it had grown a necessity for her to admire had
suffered so deep a humiliation and, as at the time
of the May festival under the Ratisbon lindens, the
sympathy of her heart belonged to him to whom she
had apparently preferred the treacherous Saxon duke.

The treaty of Passau, which soon followed his flight,
was to impose upon the monarch things scarcely less
hard to bear; for it compelled him to allow the Protestants
in Germany the free exercise of their religion, and
to release his prisoners, the Elector John Frederick
of Saxony and the Landgrave Philip of Hesse.

Whatever befell the sovereign she brought into connection
with herself. Charles’s motto had now become
unattainable for him, as since her loss of voice it
had been for her. Her heart bled unseen, and his
misfortune inflicted new wounds upon it. How
he, toward whom the whole world looked, and whose
sensitive soul endured with so much difficulty the
slightest transgression of his will and his inclination,
would recover from the destruction of the most earnest,
nay, the most sacred aspirations of a whole life,
was utterly incomprehensible to her. To restore
the unity of religion had been as warm a desire of
his heart as the cultivation of singing had been cherished
by hers, and the treaty of Passau ceded to the millions
of German Protestants the right to remain separated
from the Catholic Church. This must utterly cloud,
darken, poison his already joyless existence.
Spite of the wrong he had done her, how gladly, had
she not been lost to art, she would now have tried
upon him its elevating, consoling power!

From her old confessor, her husband, and others she
learned that Charles scarcely paid any further heed
to the political affairs of the German nation, which
had once been so important to him; and with intense
indignation she heard the fellow-countrymen whom her
husband brought to the house declare that, in her
German native land, Charles was now as bitterly hated
as he had formerly been loved and reverenced.